12 ms·

World’s Biggest Indoor Vertical Farm Near NYC to Use 95% Less Water

156 points by rottyguy 10y ago

marak830 10y ago
Damn. I was going to say we need this in Japan, but it does mention a Japanese one. I wonder what the costs are like though? Worker hours and electrical).
- newmanships 10y ago
  You might enjoy reading this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-firm-to-open-worlds-first-robot-run-farm http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-... :)
  - marak830 10y ago
    Nice, thank you!
petepete 10y ago
Not really on the same scale but there's a farm in a former air raid shelter beneath London. http://growing-underground.com/ http://growing-underground.com/
pjc50 10y ago
... and how much energy by comparison with conventional outdoor farming?
- Already__Taken 10y ago
  Anything under an existing farm + 95% the energy it takes to treat/move the water is a win I would have thought.
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    It would be but they'll be lucky to only use 100 times as much electrical/mechanical energy as a traditional far. If you include sunlight they'll use less energy than a traditional farm but that comes for free at no environmental cost.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    You're forgetting the vast energy provided free to a regular farm by sunlight. Average daily solar energy falling on each square meter of the Earth is 6 kWh [1]. You're right that irrigation is a significant energy cost: for example [2], irrigating 135 acres in Nebraska will use 50,000 kWh over the course of one season. But an acre has 4046 square meters. Based on the global average, that same 135 acres will collect 3,277,260 kWh of solar energy over the course of a single day. That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting. Optimizing spectrum can cut the lighting energy in half, and other measures like packing plants more tightly can help, but even if you reduce it by 90% it still dwarfs the energy expense of regular farms. It may be a reasonable expense for particular crops that don't want full sun anyway, but energy usage isn't likely to ever be an advantage for indoor farms. An acceptable disadvantage in certain cases, maybe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth [2] http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-Irrigation.pdf http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-Irrigat...
    - mistermann 10y ago
      > That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting. To reproduce natural sunlight, but is that level actually needed for adequate plant growth?
      - DennisP 10y ago
        No, which is why I included the sentences after that. It's a lot of energy even if it reduced the lighting requirement by 99%. It might be feasible for certain crops, but it's still going to be much more energy than an outdoor farm uses. Seems to me greenhouses are a better way to go: free lighting, while still using less water and chemicals.
- ddeck 10y ago
  Left conveniently not discussed in the article. Based on the drawing in the article, it looks like they use no natural lighting at all. While clearly crop dependent, even in a glass building: "The environmental writer George Monbiot calculated that the cost of providing enough supplementary light to grow the grain for a single loaf would be about $15" [1] A quick search reveals that typical crop photosynthetic efficiency is around 1-2% [2], and I'm guessing that's likely calculated based on the light that falls directly on the leaf. The sun delivers >1 kW per square meter in the middle of the day. That's a whole lot of power to replace, even accounting for savings through focusing on the most important wavelengths. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Energy_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Energy_use [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
  - fencepost 10y ago
    There's also a note at the very very bottom of the article that "it seems that the energy issue might be reduced by the introduction of a new generation of LED grow lights which reduce the energy required by just providing the plants with the part of the radiation spectrum that they require for growth." It's not clear whether this is from Monbiot or the person who provided the numbers, but either way I invite you to consider the changes in quality, availability and pricing for standard LED bulbs as replacements for incandescent bulbs in the six years since that article was published.
- wcchandler 10y ago
  I'll chime in with some personal research -- not all plants need 100% full sun. You can quickly argue that you have waste at the plant level if you're dedicating "open air" to a plant that doesn't need it. First plant that comes to mind is Kale. Doesn't need full sun, but likes being "open." Stacking the plants vertically allow you to control the sun and better disperse it more evenly. There may be waste, but there's also a lot of waste that occurs naturally.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    You also don't need the full visible light spectrum. You only need a small subset that the plants will absorb. If you're going to generatethe light yourself, you can save a lot of energey by only emitting the correct spectrums of light.
- demonshreder 10y ago
  There seems to be energy conservative alternatives for lettuce via a vertical greenhouse system at Singapore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ http://www.skygreens.com/ http://www.skygreens.com/ This is the country that fined a Tesla owner for indirect emissions. http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a28417/singapore-government-fines-tesla-model-s-owner/ http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a28417/singapore-g...
mrfusion 10y ago
Wouldn't issues with weeds and pests also be way better? You just don't let them in? If they could sell crops with zero herbicides or pesticides you'd think they could clean up.
- ddeck 10y ago
  There's a few restaurants and organizations I'm aware of doing this in Hong Kong. E.g.: http://www.iveggie.com.hk/index.php/en/ http://www.iveggie.com.hk/index.php/en/ I believe they were using 1000 kWh of power per day a few years ago and their estimated carbon footprint was estimated at around 13x that of a traditional farm by a local environmental group. I think the costs only really worked out where they could charge a significant premium, such as use in their restaurant.
- wcchandler 10y ago
  Yes. These systems are usually pretty well contained and a lot of care is taken to isolate growth areas from pathogens. Your biggest concern is bacterial cultures or fungal growth. But even that is usually handled pretty easily and cheaply.
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  Not really, once they've gotten in the only intervention is aggressive quarantining and drenching everything with pesticides. Outside, there's much better access to things that eat pests, e.g. wasps/spiders/viruses, and infestations are less likely to be catastrophic. Of course, this might be different in inner-city environments and there are people that supply some types of pests' pests for use in greenhouses.
  - tomp 10y ago
    Couldn't you compartmentalise the food so that you'd only need to throw away a single "block" of food if it gets contaminated?
- ovi256 10y ago
  The way they want to do it may very well be the first true way to do organic farming, if by organic you mean "farming that delivers products with less mutagenic and cancerogenic content". Contemporary organic farming replaces applying pesticides with pest-resistant breeds of plants, which simply make their own pesticides. This does not result, as commonly understood, in a reduction in exposure to pesticides, only to applied pesticides. You can read more in this excellent post by Richard Muller on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about-food/answer/Richard-Muller-3 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about...
tgb 10y ago
It seems like NYC is a poor place to house this. Ideally, if you wanted it to be viable and not just a proof-of-concept, you'd find somewhere with cheap electricity, cheaper land/rent than NYC[1], and expensive fresh produce. My guess is Iceland would be a good spot, and I'd be a little surprised if they didn't have something like this already in the works. Iceland also has another side benefit for traditional greenhouses: the ground can naturally heat the houses. http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-utilization/greenhouses/ http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-utilization/greenhouses/ [1] It's actually in Newark, not sure what property prices are like there.
- brainflake 10y ago
  Cheap to extremely cheap. Newark has been plagued with low employment and violence for a long time, although it is currently going through a bit of an uptick thanks mostly to investments in the downtown area and general positive attention due to Corey Booker.
  - ascagnel_ 10y ago
    The issue with Newark is good access to clean water and air pollution. Newark (especially the Passaic River that cuts through the city) has a long history of terrible pollution, and the shipyards and airport contribute to some generally poor air quality.
    - tomp 10y ago
      Couldn't an indoors farm use a closed air system? Actually, no - it would probably consume CO2 and produce O2, so there would need to be some exchange with the external world, but it would probably be beneficial to do it in a controlled manner, to avoid loosing water and getting pollution in.
- sharpercoder 10y ago
  More factors com into play then just energy costs. Warmth, distance-to-market, water, real estate just to name a few.
wcchandler 10y ago
Man this stuff gets me pumped up. I've always wanted to be a farmer, but it never made economical sense to pursue. I've been dabbling (more than just dabbling...) with hydroponics, LEDs and automation for grows. Within the next 3-5 years I'll probably be able to finally pursue this dream with all these advancements. Love it! Can't wait!
- rmah 10y ago
  It makes even less economic sense to farm indoors.
  - wcchandler 10y ago
    Except for when it's winter time and nothing can grow outside. :) But even then, only if the infrastructure is already in place.
brudgers 10y ago
[Warning metric not used] I was reading this and trying to parse the economics. I mean 70k square feet is about two acres [@ 43560/acre] and at 75x efficiency per square foot it works out to about 150 acres of farmland. Lets call it a quarter section [160 acres]. Now a quarter section is the size farm my boy's Great Grandpa Fred farmed with his German speaking father and a mule in Kussuth County, Iowa the better part of 100 years ago. Enough land in a year with no major misfortune to support a family farm as a business but that today would perhaps need subscribed city folk and organic certification and a used tractor to be a gentleman's break even hobby. At this point in the rant I was going to write, I was going to write about how little food two million pounds is and how it would never make a dent in the logistics of feeding people. And as I composed that part in my head, "two million pounds" seemed a queer [with no sexual connotation] way of marketing the output. And the whole thing made little sense economically...I mean even at Whole Foods, two million pounds of tomatoes might barely keep the lights on and the employee parking lot full. I thought "What are they smoking?" And it looks to me like this is an effort to get out in front of marijuana legalization. Two million pounds at even a piddly $1000/per does make sense with the big bucks of the Big Apple's stoners spitting distance away. And since that is consistent with my heuristic that when someone looks like an idiot and they're not a teenager, then I'm probably the idiot if I assume that they are, so I figure that getting ready for growing weed is about the best sense of the venture I'm going to make.
- wcchandler 10y ago
  Agreed. Right now the only thing that's economically viable to grow with these setups is cannabis. But it does lay a good foundation for innovation and research.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    I wonder. If cannabis is legalized presumably the price will fall and take out of the realm of economic viability.
    - wcchandler 10y ago
      Good question. My estimates from ~6 months ago suggested I could sustain 90% drop in price and still be sustainable and profitable, albeit, less lucrative. ($2k/lb -> $200/lb)
OhHeyItsE 10y ago
"Near NYC" :( C'mon - throw Newark a bone already!
- gravypod 10y ago
  I know how it feels. I've just taken to aying that I go to college next to NYC.
kefka 10y ago
There's something neat going on here. Projects like this take growing that happens in the rural areas to the city. We've always had a strife between country and city life, and country life is where food is grown. With this change, we're seeing food done in the city as well. Of course this could be seen as potentially bad for farmers, as they lose a bit more control... But there's some awesome upsides: Potentially completely robotic. I was looking into with a friend about an automated greenhouse. It fell through due to medical disasters, but we had the nuts and bolts figured out. The gist is hydroponics with tilapia serving as protein and fertilizer for the plants. It would take around 10 mins/day for up to 100sq. ft. (it's considered that 25 sq ft is enough to feed a human indefinitely.) Provides food for a city. Now, instead of having to rely on 'elsewhere', we can point to the building where our food comes from. The gist here is that there's now food security. Lower transportation costs. Now, instead of food coming from 'elsewhere', it comes from the building over there. Distribution costs are cheaper, storage is onsite and local. Is not subject to the growing season. With this system in place, the growing season is now 24/7/365. Is also not subject to a host of pests or other environmental damaging effects. Everything is controlled: light, rain, drainage, nutrients. So yields will be much higher than on land. Organic can be much easier. Since there's few/no pests, neonitonoids and similar aren't needed, nor are other nasty insecticides and herbicides. Yes, it does cost more, due to using electricity. However solar is getting cheaper. These buildings could also be used in conjunction with spillover from power plants: There's no reason why the day/night cycle can't be switched, so that the grow building is using power at night, when power is usually not consumed (and is cheaper). Edit: Seriously, modded down already? How about whoever did that also leave a comment why this is not good content?
- mason240 10y ago
  This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in a pot at home. It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always going to be cheaper than building a building.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
asimuvPR 10y ago
OT: A good way to explore more about vertical indoor farming is playing the game Minecraft on a public server (the reddit server (nerd.nu) is good). You will see many working examples that will simply blow your mind away.
Dowwie 10y ago
related post I made 12 days ago, but reported by IEEE https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006
joslin01 10y ago
If you're interested in indoor farming, you'd probably be interested in aquaponics[1] -- the successful integration of hydroponics & aquaculture. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0
hallman76 10y ago
For folks in the Northeast US, the Backyard Farms brand of tomatoes has a similarly fascinating growing process[1]. They're grown in greenhouse in Maine that's the size of 20 football fields[2]. There are no pests and therefore no pesticides; no dirt, so no washing. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms
- mjhoy 10y ago
  It's a crazy building in the middle of nowhere, central Maine, about file miles away from where I grew up. I bike by it when visiting home and it's wonderfully strange. There have been pests, though: http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backyard-farms-to-destroy-crop_2013-07-10/ http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backy...
foxhop 10y ago
Food isn't supposed to grow without soil, minerials, fungus, and sunlight. It's going to be empty of nutrition and flavor. A shell of an idea of what constitutes lettuce or a carrot, tomato or potatoe. These data center clean rooms for factory food is just riddled with issues, abstracted layers of nonsense tech that wirks worse then the natural systems already working and present in nature.
- kbart 10y ago
  That's not necessarily true. It depends mostly on the quality of nutritional supplements used. I have my own experimental indoor garden under LEDs (though I still use substrate, not hydroponics yet) and their taste is by no means inferior to that brought in the organic outdoor gardens.
fencepost 10y ago
I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-stage stuff, and it's quite likely that almost everyone working in this field right now is not going to get rich any more than most of the people working on gasoline-powered horseless carriages got rich. My personal prediction is that this kind of thing is going to be a lot more common in 40 years regardless of whether the current stuff is going to be used for growing pot - and pot itself will become a much less profitable crop with legalization, though the security advantages of this kind of indoor volume growing (fields and fences? why bother?) may prolong that. What's going to be a bigger factor over time is climate change - not in the form of "zomg we're all going to cook and the plants will all die!" but in the form of increased atmospheric water and energy and extreme weather events. How many monsoon-style torrential rains per decade does it take to have a significant impact on farming? Growing up in the Midwest I used to regularly hear "farm reports" on the radio about crop damage due to hailstorms and heavy thunderstorms; for a lot of farmers it won't take a lot of damage to make their farms economically unviable. Some of this may disproportionately impact areas where a lot of food is grown[1], but it's not going to be isolated to those areas [2]. The water carrying capacity of air increases by more than 38% between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (20g/kg to 27.7g/kg), and while a 5 degree change might be extreme, we're certainly going to blow right past a 2 degree change. That extra water (and the heat energy it holds) are going to be seen in weather. There may also be some significant changes in building - for example, an all-glass skyscraper (if unobstructed) might well have an outer "shell" 5 feet from interior windows, with vertical plantings of some sort within that space - plants/greenery either for or just visible to the occupants, and if you go more extreme you might see exteriors covered with transparent photovoltaics [3] that pass through frequencies of light that are used by plants while simultaneously powering LEDs that convert the other frequencies into something the plants can use. Remember, the folks working on this stuff right now are the Apple Newton developers of their industry. What are the iPads of the industry going to look like? [1] http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wkshop_jan2012-MikeDettinger131.pdf http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wksh... [2] http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.php http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.ph... [3] http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells

156 points by rottyguy 10y ago

Damn. I was going to say we need this in Japan, but it does mention a Japanese one. I wonder what the costs are like though? Worker hours and electrical).

newmanships 10y ago
You might enjoy reading this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-firm-to-open-worlds-first-robot-run-farm http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-... :)
- marak830 10y ago
  Nice, thank you!

petepete 10y ago

Not really on the same scale but there's a farm in a former air raid shelter beneath London. http://growing-underground.com/ http://growing-underground.com/

pjc50 10y ago

... and how much energy by comparison with conventional outdoor farming?

Already__Taken 10y ago
Anything under an existing farm + 95% the energy it takes to treat/move the water is a win I would have thought.
- Symmetry 10y ago
  It would be but they'll be lucky to only use 100 times as much electrical/mechanical energy as a traditional far. If you include sunlight they'll use less energy than a traditional farm but that comes for free at no environmental cost.
- DennisP 10y ago
  You're forgetting the vast energy provided free to a regular farm by sunlight. Average daily solar energy falling on each square meter of the Earth is 6 kWh [1]. You're right that irrigation is a significant energy cost: for example [2], irrigating 135 acres in Nebraska will use 50,000 kWh over the course of one season. But an acre has 4046 square meters. Based on the global average, that same 135 acres will collect 3,277,260 kWh of solar energy over the course of a single day. That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting. Optimizing spectrum can cut the lighting energy in half, and other measures like packing plants more tightly can help, but even if you reduce it by 90% it still dwarfs the energy expense of regular farms. It may be a reasonable expense for particular crops that don't want full sun anyway, but energy usage isn't likely to ever be an advantage for indoor farms. An acceptable disadvantage in certain cases, maybe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Earth [2] http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-Irrigation.pdf http://www.loup.com/docs/energysvc/energywise/EW-Tip-Irrigat...
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > That's the energy an indoor farm has to consume from power stations, just for lighting. To reproduce natural sunlight, but is that level actually needed for adequate plant growth?
    - DennisP 10y ago
      No, which is why I included the sentences after that. It's a lot of energy even if it reduced the lighting requirement by 99%. It might be feasible for certain crops, but it's still going to be much more energy than an outdoor farm uses. Seems to me greenhouses are a better way to go: free lighting, while still using less water and chemicals.
ddeck 10y ago
Left conveniently not discussed in the article. Based on the drawing in the article, it looks like they use no natural lighting at all. While clearly crop dependent, even in a glass building: "The environmental writer George Monbiot calculated that the cost of providing enough supplementary light to grow the grain for a single loaf would be about $15" [1] A quick search reveals that typical crop photosynthetic efficiency is around 1-2% [2], and I'm guessing that's likely calculated based on the light that falls directly on the leaf. The sun delivers >1 kW per square meter in the middle of the day. That's a whole lot of power to replace, even accounting for savings through focusing on the most important wavelengths. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Energy_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming#Energy_use [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
- fencepost 10y ago
  There's also a note at the very very bottom of the article that "it seems that the energy issue might be reduced by the introduction of a new generation of LED grow lights which reduce the energy required by just providing the plants with the part of the radiation spectrum that they require for growth." It's not clear whether this is from Monbiot or the person who provided the numbers, but either way I invite you to consider the changes in quality, availability and pricing for standard LED bulbs as replacements for incandescent bulbs in the six years since that article was published.
wcchandler 10y ago
I'll chime in with some personal research -- not all plants need 100% full sun. You can quickly argue that you have waste at the plant level if you're dedicating "open air" to a plant that doesn't need it. First plant that comes to mind is Kale. Doesn't need full sun, but likes being "open." Stacking the plants vertically allow you to control the sun and better disperse it more evenly. There may be waste, but there's also a lot of waste that occurs naturally.
- gravypod 10y ago
  You also don't need the full visible light spectrum. You only need a small subset that the plants will absorb. If you're going to generatethe light yourself, you can save a lot of energey by only emitting the correct spectrums of light.
demonshreder 10y ago
There seems to be energy conservative alternatives for lettuce via a vertical greenhouse system at Singapore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFQOkzEjxQ http://www.skygreens.com/ http://www.skygreens.com/ This is the country that fined a Tesla owner for indirect emissions. http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a28417/singapore-government-fines-tesla-model-s-owner/ http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a28417/singapore-g...

mrfusion 10y ago

Wouldn't issues with weeds and pests also be way better? You just don't let them in? If they could sell crops with zero herbicides or pesticides you'd think they could clean up.

ddeck 10y ago
There's a few restaurants and organizations I'm aware of doing this in Hong Kong. E.g.: http://www.iveggie.com.hk/index.php/en/ http://www.iveggie.com.hk/index.php/en/ I believe they were using 1000 kWh of power per day a few years ago and their estimated carbon footprint was estimated at around 13x that of a traditional farm by a local environmental group. I think the costs only really worked out where they could charge a significant premium, such as use in their restaurant.
wcchandler 10y ago
Yes. These systems are usually pretty well contained and a lot of care is taken to isolate growth areas from pathogens. Your biggest concern is bacterial cultures or fungal growth. But even that is usually handled pretty easily and cheaply.
xkcd-sucks 10y ago
Not really, once they've gotten in the only intervention is aggressive quarantining and drenching everything with pesticides. Outside, there's much better access to things that eat pests, e.g. wasps/spiders/viruses, and infestations are less likely to be catastrophic. Of course, this might be different in inner-city environments and there are people that supply some types of pests' pests for use in greenhouses.
- tomp 10y ago
  Couldn't you compartmentalise the food so that you'd only need to throw away a single "block" of food if it gets contaminated?
ovi256 10y ago
The way they want to do it may very well be the first true way to do organic farming, if by organic you mean "farming that delivers products with less mutagenic and cancerogenic content". Contemporary organic farming replaces applying pesticides with pest-resistant breeds of plants, which simply make their own pesticides. This does not result, as commonly understood, in a reduction in exposure to pesticides, only to applied pesticides. You can read more in this excellent post by Richard Muller on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about-food/answer/Richard-Muller-3 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-mind-blowing-facts-about...

tgb 10y ago

It seems like NYC is a poor place to house this. Ideally, if you wanted it to be viable and not just a proof-of-concept, you'd find somewhere with cheap electricity, cheaper land/rent than NYC[1], and expensive fresh produce. My guess is Iceland would be a good spot, and I'd be a little surprised if they didn't have something like this already in the works. Iceland also has another side benefit for traditional greenhouses: the ground can naturally heat the houses. http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-utilization/greenhouses/ http://www.nea.is/geothermal/direct-utilization/greenhouses/ [1] It's actually in Newark, not sure what property prices are like there.

brainflake 10y ago
Cheap to extremely cheap. Newark has been plagued with low employment and violence for a long time, although it is currently going through a bit of an uptick thanks mostly to investments in the downtown area and general positive attention due to Corey Booker.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  The issue with Newark is good access to clean water and air pollution. Newark (especially the Passaic River that cuts through the city) has a long history of terrible pollution, and the shipyards and airport contribute to some generally poor air quality.
  - tomp 10y ago
    Couldn't an indoors farm use a closed air system? Actually, no - it would probably consume CO2 and produce O2, so there would need to be some exchange with the external world, but it would probably be beneficial to do it in a controlled manner, to avoid loosing water and getting pollution in.
sharpercoder 10y ago
More factors com into play then just energy costs. Warmth, distance-to-market, water, real estate just to name a few.

wcchandler 10y ago

Man this stuff gets me pumped up. I've always wanted to be a farmer, but it never made economical sense to pursue. I've been dabbling (more than just dabbling...) with hydroponics, LEDs and automation for grows. Within the next 3-5 years I'll probably be able to finally pursue this dream with all these advancements. Love it! Can't wait!

rmah 10y ago
It makes even less economic sense to farm indoors.
- wcchandler 10y ago
  Except for when it's winter time and nothing can grow outside. :) But even then, only if the infrastructure is already in place.

brudgers 10y ago

[Warning metric not used] I was reading this and trying to parse the economics. I mean 70k square feet is about two acres [@ 43560/acre] and at 75x efficiency per square foot it works out to about 150 acres of farmland. Lets call it a quarter section [160 acres]. Now a quarter section is the size farm my boy's Great Grandpa Fred farmed with his German speaking father and a mule in Kussuth County, Iowa the better part of 100 years ago. Enough land in a year with no major misfortune to support a family farm as a business but that today would perhaps need subscribed city folk and organic certification and a used tractor to be a gentleman's break even hobby. At this point in the rant I was going to write, I was going to write about how little food two million pounds is and how it would never make a dent in the logistics of feeding people. And as I composed that part in my head, "two million pounds" seemed a queer [with no sexual connotation] way of marketing the output. And the whole thing made little sense economically...I mean even at Whole Foods, two million pounds of tomatoes might barely keep the lights on and the employee parking lot full. I thought "What are they smoking?" And it looks to me like this is an effort to get out in front of marijuana legalization. Two million pounds at even a piddly $1000/per does make sense with the big bucks of the Big Apple's stoners spitting distance away. And since that is consistent with my heuristic that when someone looks like an idiot and they're not a teenager, then I'm probably the idiot if I assume that they are, so I figure that getting ready for growing weed is about the best sense of the venture I'm going to make.

wcchandler 10y ago
Agreed. Right now the only thing that's economically viable to grow with these setups is cannabis. But it does lay a good foundation for innovation and research.
- gozur88 10y ago
  I wonder. If cannabis is legalized presumably the price will fall and take out of the realm of economic viability.
  - wcchandler 10y ago
    Good question. My estimates from ~6 months ago suggested I could sustain 90% drop in price and still be sustainable and profitable, albeit, less lucrative. ($2k/lb -> $200/lb)

OhHeyItsE 10y ago

"Near NYC" :( C'mon - throw Newark a bone already!

gravypod 10y ago
I know how it feels. I've just taken to aying that I go to college next to NYC.

kefka 10y ago

There's something neat going on here. Projects like this take growing that happens in the rural areas to the city. We've always had a strife between country and city life, and country life is where food is grown. With this change, we're seeing food done in the city as well. Of course this could be seen as potentially bad for farmers, as they lose a bit more control... But there's some awesome upsides: Potentially completely robotic. I was looking into with a friend about an automated greenhouse. It fell through due to medical disasters, but we had the nuts and bolts figured out. The gist is hydroponics with tilapia serving as protein and fertilizer for the plants. It would take around 10 mins/day for up to 100sq. ft. (it's considered that 25 sq ft is enough to feed a human indefinitely.) Provides food for a city. Now, instead of having to rely on 'elsewhere', we can point to the building where our food comes from. The gist here is that there's now food security. Lower transportation costs. Now, instead of food coming from 'elsewhere', it comes from the building over there. Distribution costs are cheaper, storage is onsite and local. Is not subject to the growing season. With this system in place, the growing season is now 24/7/365. Is also not subject to a host of pests or other environmental damaging effects. Everything is controlled: light, rain, drainage, nutrients. So yields will be much higher than on land. Organic can be much easier. Since there's few/no pests, neonitonoids and similar aren't needed, nor are other nasty insecticides and herbicides. Yes, it does cost more, due to using electricity. However solar is getting cheaper. These buildings could also be used in conjunction with spillover from power plants: There's no reason why the day/night cycle can't be switched, so that the grow building is using power at night, when power is usually not consumed (and is cheaper). Edit: Seriously, modded down already? How about whoever did that also leave a comment why this is not good content?

mason240 10y ago
This is not going replace farming anymore than me growing a spinach plant in a pot at home. It's actually a little disappointing to see just how out of touch the people in this thread are with farming. Growing food outside, in the ground is always going to be cheaper than building a building.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago

asimuvPR 10y ago

OT: A good way to explore more about vertical indoor farming is playing the game Minecraft on a public server (the reddit server (nerd.nu) is good). You will see many working examples that will simply blow your mind away.

Dowwie 10y ago

related post I made 12 days ago, but reported by IEEE https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11766006

joslin01 10y ago

If you're interested in indoor farming, you'd probably be interested in aquaponics[1] -- the successful integration of hydroponics & aquaculture. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYR9s6chrI0

hallman76 10y ago

For folks in the Northeast US, the Backyard Farms brand of tomatoes has a similarly fascinating growing process[1]. They're grown in greenhouse in Maine that's the size of 20 football fields[2]. There are no pests and therefore no pesticides; no dirt, so no washing. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/dining/31tomato.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_Farms

mjhoy 10y ago
It's a crazy building in the middle of nowhere, central Maine, about file miles away from where I grew up. I bike by it when visiting home and it's wonderfully strange. There have been pests, though: http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backyard-farms-to-destroy-crop_2013-07-10/ http://www.pressherald.com/2013/07/10/whiteflies-force-backy...

foxhop 10y ago

Food isn't supposed to grow without soil, minerials, fungus, and sunlight. It's going to be empty of nutrition and flavor. A shell of an idea of what constitutes lettuce or a carrot, tomato or potatoe. These data center clean rooms for factory food is just riddled with issues, abstracted layers of nonsense tech that wirks worse then the natural systems already working and present in nature.

kbart 10y ago
That's not necessarily true. It depends mostly on the quality of nutritional supplements used. I have my own experimental indoor garden under LEDs (though I still use substrate, not hydroponics yet) and their taste is by no means inferior to that brought in the organic outdoor gardens.

fencepost 10y ago

I wish I'd seen this and had a chance to reply earlier. I think a lot of commenters are missing some key points. First, this is still pretty early-stage stuff, and it's quite likely that almost everyone working in this field right now is not going to get rich any more than most of the people working on gasoline-powered horseless carriages got rich. My personal prediction is that this kind of thing is going to be a lot more common in 40 years regardless of whether the current stuff is going to be used for growing pot - and pot itself will become a much less profitable crop with legalization, though the security advantages of this kind of indoor volume growing (fields and fences? why bother?) may prolong that. What's going to be a bigger factor over time is climate change - not in the form of "zomg we're all going to cook and the plants will all die!" but in the form of increased atmospheric water and energy and extreme weather events. How many monsoon-style torrential rains per decade does it take to have a significant impact on farming? Growing up in the Midwest I used to regularly hear "farm reports" on the radio about crop damage due to hailstorms and heavy thunderstorms; for a lot of farmers it won't take a lot of damage to make their farms economically unviable. Some of this may disproportionately impact areas where a lot of food is grown[1], but it's not going to be isolated to those areas [2]. The water carrying capacity of air increases by more than 38% between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius (20g/kg to 27.7g/kg), and while a 5 degree change might be extreme, we're certainly going to blow right past a 2 degree change. That extra water (and the heat energy it holds) are going to be seen in weather. There may also be some significant changes in building - for example, an all-glass skyscraper (if unobstructed) might well have an outer "shell" 5 feet from interior windows, with vertical plantings of some sort within that space - plants/greenery either for or just visible to the occupants, and if you go more extreme you might see exteriors covered with transparent photovoltaics [3] that pass through frequencies of light that are used by plants while simultaneously powering LEDs that convert the other frequencies into something the plants can use. Remember, the folks working on this stuff right now are the Apple Newton developers of their industry. What are the iPads of the industry going to look like? [1] http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wkshop_jan2012-MikeDettinger131.pdf http://www.water.ca.gov/climatechange/docs/dwr_extremes_wksh... [2] http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.php http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Water/page3.ph... [3] http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells